Posts Tagged ‘elevator buzz’

Here’s the presentation for the Elevator Buzz concept that my team worked on for the Intel-CIID industry project. The storyline for the scenario is as follows: three office goers step into the office elevator, as as they arrive at differnt floors on their way up, a visualization inside the elevtor shows the energy efficiency of the floor. The performance of the floor is reflected in the expression of the person who works there, ranging from embarrassment to elation. At the end of the piece, the worker on a floor with low energy efficiency makes a small behavioral change (switches off the light in an unused office space) for the better.

The panels were then drawn up in a neater, crisper scanario to use as context-setting probes for acquiring later user feedback on the concept. The reactions and feedback gathered from users were used to define next steps, setting the agenda for the overall design direction of the project.

On the Intel-CIID industry project: based on user research conducted with people in India and South Korea, my team decided to explore the particular idea that came out of brainstorming – not as a final solution but as a critical exercise to understand the context for design better.

In retrospect, this turned out to be a very useful technique. In the constant challenge of choosing between zooming in or out, (reflecting on created material or designing forward) its nice to take the latter step now and then a little in advance of its time. Simply shifting into a ‘lets just build this out, shall we’ mode, while still in the process of understanding the design context, is a great way to prevent getting too bogged down by highly refined needs, and consequentially a stunted, myopic view of the whole opportunity landscape.

A work in progress - the sudio space while brainstorming

During our user research, we found that young educated professionals were a very appropriate group to work with for this project, mostly because our Indian and Korean subjects seemed to share many similarities in terms of lifestyles and aspirations. We also moved away from the residential context for several reasons. Firstly, there was much more consensus in the view of our research subjects in their office environments than their homes. Then, there really wasn’t too much common among ‘typical’ residential communities across India and South Korea. Also, office spaces seemed to offer much more potential to explore the main theme of the project ‘The Social Collective as an Agent of Behavioral Change”; office goers seemed much more a ‘collective’ of any sort, capable of exploiting existing group dynamics towards common goals. And finally, interventions to spark behavioral change in the office space had the potential to create huge impact on better energy management, as the huge (technology industry) office spaces in India and Korea with thousands of workers were not uncommon.

A work in progress - me, thought crunching.

The key insight from user research we developed the idea from was:”How might we create opportunities for upwardly-mobile office workers to make visible contributions to sustainable issues?”

The idea was simple: how would a real-time information visualization in the office elevator motivate individuals to make better energy management choices. The concept and sketches to be discussed in a further post …